David Campbell's fortunes in the media over the past week are a timely reminder that we still have no idea how to think about homosexuality.

When Channel Seven broke the story of Campbell's penchant for gay sex clubs last Thursday, it was greeted by the usual mix of perverse fascination (because it was a sex scandal) and the inevitable Schadenfreude (because it involved a politician). And yet, beneath it all, there lay something far less defined, and far more discomfiting.

There lingered the feeling that somehow this just wasn't kosher.

By Friday morning, reactions to the story began to bifurcate as that undefined feeling took shape.

NSW Premier Kristina Keneally, attempting to butch-up and stamp her authority on a government in the throes of yet another sex scandal, took a hard line describing Campbell's duplicity as "unforgivable". Uncertain as to how this story was going to play out in the media, Keneally proceeded to criticise both Campbell's use of his ministerial car to drive to gay sex club as "unacceptable" (which, as it turns out, he was entitled to do), and the media for pursuing a story that doesn't "serve any great public purpose".

Meanwhile talkback radio and ad hoc surveys on morning television - including Seven's Sunrise program - were telling a different story. Those motivated enough to participate roundly condemned Seven for tabloid-style sensationalism, the vast majority denying that Campbell ought to resign as a consequence of his 'private business'.

Public sentiment was captured nicely by the Sydney Morning Herald's Andrew West and The Australian's Imre Sulusinszky, both of whom insisted that Campbell's sexual tastes had no bearing whatsoever on his ministerial duties, and that this was little more than a "manufactured scandal".

Saturday's papers were kinder still to Campbell. The Daily Telegraph's Geoff Field went to extraordinary lengths to say absolutely nothing, while the Herald's David Marr characteristically said too much. After conceding that he found the entire David Campbell affair "an absolutely compelling, five-star yarn," Marr accused Channel Seven of a kind of retrograde bigotry, of peddling "old-fashioned ideas that hark back to a time that's all but disappeared in this country when being gay was scandal enough".

Marr adduced that the bollocking Seven was receiving on talkback radio was proof that it had misjudged its audience and that Australian culture was past such blatant homophobia. So, he concluded, Seven is left utterly exposed, despite its protests that it was serving the public interest: "Campbell has been destroyed for one reason alone: being gay."

Then, by late Saturday morning, the whole affair had seemingly come full circle. Speaking at the Sydney Writers Festival, Kristina Keneally repented of her erstwhile harsher self and expressed her deep sympathy for Campbell's situation.

"It's not unforgivable what he did," she confessed, "It is unacceptable to lie but it is equally unacceptable to live in a community where your sexuality is not accepted."

So what's going on here? How did a MP known for his ineptitude, who admitted to repeatedly cheating on his wife over a 20-year period, manage to not just escape serious media scrutiny, but emerge from an extremely salacious affair with a good deal of the press and public on his side?

Or, if I can pose the question a little more pointedly: Why could David Campbell come away as a victim, but his former cabinet colleague John Della Bosca - who resigned last September as the result of a sex scandal - couldn't?

The answer is uncomfortably obvious: because Campbell is gay. And the "official" morality which prevails in Australia is such that the mere fact that he is gay imposes an utterly false and stifling simplicity upon the complex and often conflicting attitudes toward homosexuality that remain in this country.

But not only that, within the coordinates of this "official" morality those identified as gay are frequently excused from any further moral scrutiny, either of their sexual conduct more generally (regardless of whether it is with the same sex) or of their conformity to the civil virtues of fidelity and temperance.

It is for this reason that the story almost immediately became about Channel Seven's unenlightened bigotry, or about society's non-acceptance of homosexuals, or about whether the private life of politicians belongs to the public interest - everything but David Campbell's own conduct.

In a justly famous essay for The New Republic titled The Politics of Homosexuality, Andrew Sullivan gave perhaps the most compelling explanation of the logic at play here.

In that essay, he tried to map the conflicting attempts to grapple with the question of homosexuality that so defined the American political terrain in the late '80s and early '90s. He did this through a taxonomy of terms: conservative, radical, moderate and liberal.

But, Sullivan noted that, while the "liberal politics of homosexuality" has proven the most "durable", it is ultimately just as deficient as the others because it can only see the issue "through the prism of the civil rights movement". In its noble quest to extend legal protections to all minorities and to ensure non-discrimination against homosexuals, liberalism necessarily "restricts itself to law - not culture - in addressing social problems".

Consequently, Sullivan argued that "by describing all homosexuals as a monolithic minority" - in much the same way as blanket civil rights legislation "draws a veil over the varieties of black America by casting the question entirely in terms of non-black attitudes" - liberalism finds it necessary to "avoid the complexities of the gay world as a whole".

In much the same way as Noel Pearson rejects the liberal politics of Indigenous victimisation, Sullivan rejected the liberal politics of homosexuality because it is incapable of doing anything but to "extend to homosexuals the same protections they have granted to other minorities".

In other words, liberalism is based on the assumption that "the full equality of homosexuals can be accomplished by designating gay people as victims". And this, he insisted, is not just morally crippling; it demeans us all.

As the David Campbell affair demonstrates, the liberal politics of homosexuality - with its fetishising of victimhood - so prevalent in Australia has yielded precisely the results that Sullivan anticipated.

The consequence of this liberal conceit, which shouts down any public departure from the "official" morality - whether it be Tony Abbott's candid admission that he feels "threatened" by homosexuality or Jason Akermanis's advice that gay footballers should stay in the closest - is that we find ourselves culturally impaired.

We haven't the capacity to conduct an intelligent public discussion about homosexuality, much less about the personal, civil and, yes, political virtues that would constitute a good society.

This capacity is further eroded when "private business" is elevated over public or civic virtue. The incontrovertible sanctity of privacy and personal choice has produced a kind of cultural insouciance in which we have collectively forgotten that virtue is acquired by habit, that it is shaped by one's lovers and friends, and that it ought to define a person in public and in private - not to mention that fidelity is a virtue, and not some mouldering relic from a bygone era.

The real tragedy of the David Campbell affair is that a feeble defence of his right to the anonymity of a gay sex club was allowed to occupy the place of a lament over the devastation this has wrought on Campbell's marriage, and any criticism of the deleterious effect of anonymous sex on civil society itself.

And yet, as Andrew Sullivan has rightly pointed out, so long as marriage is denied to homosexual couples, "their relationships are given no anchor, no endpoint, no way of integrating them fully into the network of family and friends that makes someone a full member of civil society."

If there was any moral to the whole sordid ordeal, perhaps this is it.

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